Poe's Sea Tales

When one thinks of Edgar Allan Poe, one thinks of gloomy lands, haunted mansions, or claustrophobic tombs. As Poe himself noted, the idea of being buried alive might be the most terrifying of all. But Poe's writing also contains horrific imagery of the open sea and of the deep. The relationship between terror and the sea is made clear in such tales as "MS. Found in a Bottle," "Descent into the Maelstrom," and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The sea provides an important scene for Poe, and Poe shows that horror may be found as easily aboard a ship as in a haunted house.

"MS. Found in a Bottle," Poe's first published short story, establishes the sea as a classic location for horror. It tells of a man whose ship gets caught in a hurricane. After days of drifting on the storm-tossed seas, his boat is crushed beneath the weight of an enormous ship, and the narrator is catapulted onto the strange vessel. The crew of the spectral ship is made up of strange old men, who either cannot or will not see, and who mutter in a foreign language. The narrator soon finds that ship is traveling at a tremendous speed, as if pulled by a strong undertow, heading south. As the ship nears the South Pole, it becomes caught in a great whirlpool and goes down. A unique sort of "premature burial," the narrator presumably dies, but--as the title indicates--not before transmitting the harrowing tale in the only way possible.

In "Descent into the Maelstrom," the narrator survives his encounter with the ocean, but just barely. A Norwegian fisherman, the narrator gets caught in another terrible storm, and finds himself and his boat spinning within the dizzying whirlpool of the Maelstrom. The old sailor describes the sheer terror of sinking amid the waves into the vortex. But he also figures out that some of the flotsam seemed to sink more rapidly than others; if he could only manage to stay out of the center of the maelstrom for a while, it would dissipate and he might survive. That is what he does, by throwing himself overboard with a cask. The ship is destroyed, but the old Norwegian lives. However, he is permanently marked by his encounter with